page_title: Celia Thaxter
section_title: Mainland
hierarchical_section_title: Celia Thaxter / Career / Mainland
caption_attribution_description: English: The Celia Thaxter House in Newton, Massachusetts. On the National Register of Historic Places in Newton, Massachusetts. This is my 2009 photo.
context_page_description: Celia Laighton Thaxter was an American writer of poetry and stories. For most of her life, she lived with her father on the Isles of Shoals at his Appledore Hotel. How she grew up to become a writer is detailed in her early autobiography, and her book entitled Among the Isles of Shoals. Thaxter became one of America's favorite authors in the late 19th century. Among her best-known poems are "The Burgomaster Gull", "Landlocked", "Milking", "The Great White Owl", "The Kingfisher", and "The Sandpiper".
context_section_description: On September 13, 1851, at the age of 16, she married Levi Thaxter and moved to the mainland, residing first in Watertown, Massachusetts, at a property his father owned. In 1854, they accepted an offer to use a house in Newburyport. The couple then acquired their own home, today called the Celia Thaxter House, built in 1856 near the Charles River at Newtonville. By then, they had two sons, Karl and John. Roland was born in 1858, and went on to become a prominent mycologist who taught at Harvard University where he studied insect-associated fungi and Myxobacteria.
  Her first published poem was written during this time on the mainland. That poem, "Land-Locked", was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 and earned her US$10. In 1879, Thaxter suddenly became known upon the literary horizon with a collection of poems entitled Driftwood, and considering that they came from a group of islands, away from the mainland far enough to prevent frequent communication, the debuting work was received with almost as much surprise as pleasure. Although stray poems of the ocean had been published, signed with the name of "Celia Thaxter", still it was difficult for the critical reviewer of Boston to realize that the bearer of this name was actually a long time resident, if not exactly a native of those isles lying off the coast of New Hampshire. Her poetry appeared in the Atlantic, Century, Harper's, Independent, New England Magazine, and Scribner's, while her writing for juvenile audiences appeared in Our Young Folks and St. Nicholas.
caption: The Celia Thaxter House, Newtonville
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